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AvePoint Meeting Workspace App

Maybe you’ve seen it when you started playing with SharePoint 2013 or SharePoint Online, that the Meeting Workspace is not available anymore. So what does this mean? Do we have to create our own Meeting Workspace template? Well there are some very smart guys like Frank Op ‘t Landt who created his own template: http://sharepoint-community.net/profiles/blogs/the-alternative-for-meeting-workspaces-in-sharepoint-2013 .

But this takes some work and I want to point you in the direction of awesome tool that AvePoint is providing for free. I’m not a AvePoint employee, but whenever somebody makes a good product and provides it for free. I’m in. So let’s check it out.

AvePoint Meetings is an App. So the first thing that we need to do is, getting the App from the App Store.

Once the App is trusted and attached to Site or Site Collection, it is time to use it. Click on the AvePoint Meeting App.

And now we can start using the App. When we look carefully at the url we’ll see that the App actually runs on AvePoint, but it connects seamless with your data. Even better, your data is still stored on your Site(Collection).

You can define your meeting as recurring or as a single meeting.

Notifications are sent out -either in your name or by using the AvePoint service- and you’ll enter the Meeting Room Space.

When you select a meeting you’ll get the TimeLine with the attendees and a notification of the attendee is online in this Meeting Room which is a huge benefit.

The second part of the Meeting is the Agenda

You can add in an agendaitem, actions, notes, attachments and decisions all with their specific meta data.

So AvePoint Meeting is a nice App, with visualization of data in a very structured way. It looks really cool and it ‘s very handy for our end users. But how about getting overviews of your data, meeting notes, … The cool thing is that all your data is stored on your own tenant and when we look at the Site Content we’ll see all the list that the App uses to fill up the meetings.

The Link between all these tables is the column GUID. Knowing this we can easily create our own Dashboards by using Connections between WebParts to get all the required information.

So recap: we have an awesome App that gives you all the structure a meeting workspace should have ( for free ) and by building our own dashboard on the source data it uses for the App (that is stored in our tenant) we still have an overview of our data different of the ones that the App is already providing

2 Things that I’ve experienced that would have been nice to have to aren’t available:

As far as I can see, you cannot assign Read Only member to your meetings

Attaching a document from SharePoint instead of uploading it, is also not available.